• Question: why is climate changing so fast?

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      Asked by kittenman to Cat?, Elaine, Helena, Iain, Gabriel on 7 Mar 2016.
      • Photo: Cat Scott ?

        Cat Scott ? answered on 7 Mar 2016:

        Hey kittenman,

        The climate is changing so fast at the moment because humans have emitted so much pollution into the air over the past century. The temperature of the Earth has varied in the past, but it normally happens very slowly. For example, when there is an Ice Age the temperature gradually changes over thousands of years.

        The year 1900 might seem like a very long time ago to us (Queen Victoria was still the Queen!), but compared to the history of the Earth it is not very long ago at all. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and we have crammed some major changes into a relatively short amount of time over the past century.

      • Photo: Helena Quilter

        Helena Quilter answered on 14 Mar 2016:

        Hi Kittenman!

        Like Cat said, it’s because of what we’ve been putting into the air over the last 100 years or so!

        We get a lot of our energy (like electricity) from burning fossil fuels. These are things that we dig out of the ground like coal and crude oil. They contain lots of carbon and take many millions of years to be made. We found we could make energy from burning them but when we do that we produce carbon dioxide – that’s a gas that causes goes into the atmosphere and makes the planet heat up!

        Now we know all this we can stop using the fossil fuels and start using the sun and the wind to get our energy instead – that will slow down how quickly the climate is changing!

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